hey all, well first of all I wanna say nice site and lots of good advise on this board.

Anyway, I hope you don't mind helping me out with a windows problem. Every so often when I reboot my pc I get a registry error, then it reboots and fixes itself. Good you say? Well not really, it just uses a backup copy and I lose any recently installed software, ie. drivers and apps...

I suspected bad ram, but now it's in both my pcs. I update 3 virus scanners and ran them all, no virus, I ran a "registry cleaner" app, still happened. Seeing as it only happens during booting, I went to msconfig, and only left my anti virus and system in the startup, the problem went away for like a week. Now it's back, I've noticed that MSN messenger always seems to find itself into the startup tab in msconfig...so I narrowed it down to messenger. is there anyway to stop it from getting into my startup folder permanently? Or is this just another ms flaw?

There should be a configuration option in MSN to have it start with windows. For aim, I switched that option off, then created a shortcut in my startup folder.

As for your registry problem... I'd go in DOS and move the current registry files to whatever location for your own personal backup, and replace them with the old (working) registry files. Yeah, you may lose a lot of stuff. To try to lose less, only replace user.dat and leave system.dat. That way all the essentials will be preserved.